Heat Wave by Penelope Lively (New York: Harper Collins, 1996)

A review by Laura Atkinson

The setting is the beautiful English countryside but the characters are locked in a subtle battle of wills, in keeping with the class history of the place. The idyllic-looking cottages are renovated islands of humming, blinking technology, completely surrounded and hemmed in by highly mechanized agriculture. The peaceable book trade that all the characters are engaged in, is fueled by ambition and envy and ill-feeling. So nothing is as it seems and the very weather has turned menacing. The summer is one of unremitting heat and everything is drying up and shriveling.

         The story of the novel is seen entirely from the point of view of Pauline, a fifty-something, freelance book editor who, in the course of the long, unusually hot summer, is watching her daughter’s marriage come unglued. As Pauline watches and thinks she sees her writer son-in-law, Maurice, begin an affair with an avid literary groupie, she relives her experience of being betrayed by her own husband. She begins also to muse about the sinister power of romantic love to ensnare and destroy the unwary young woman. As Andrea Dworkin famously said, “Romantic love, in pornography as in life, is the mythic celebration of female negation” (Our Blood, 1976, chapter 9). Pauline also reflects on the dangerous, even pernicious power of books, written by men in language that assumes male power and female submission, another feminist theme. She remembers that when her husband’s final affair was confirmed, her first impulse had been to burn his latest book, still in manuscript, as if the book was the source of his power over her.

But wait a moment! If it is a feminist novel then why has Pauline’s whole life and behavior been so negatively affected by her disappointment? Why is her behavior towards Maurice so unfriendly, so unyielding, even punishing, long before she has any evidence of his infidelity? Has her behavior contributed to driving him out of their small household to find acceptance elsewhere? Why is she so blind to the part that the wives’ behavior has played in the difficulties of the three other marriages-in-trouble that she comes in 0contact with? Isn’t it possible that her daughter will have a completely different reaction to her predicament than she had to hers, so many years ago? Have women‘s circumstances really changed so little over the years? And finally, why does Pauline act with such violence to solve the problem of the errant husband? If Pauline is not a reliable narrator maybe the whole story is told, after the fact, to justify her actions.

This is a novel that plays with male and female perspectives on relationships but warns of the dangers of simplistic ideas. Perhaps Lively is exploring the possible impacts of handing down through the generations corrosive ideas born of an earlier time. Only a truly feminist writer would dare to do that. This may be a good time to review the earlier work of this accomplished writer for the evolution of her ideas and preoccupations over the lifetime of her career. She seems to have a great deal to say to us about the complex relationships of the human family.

Penelope Lively, the acclaimed British writer, was born in 1933 in Cairo Egypt. She has won many awards for her children's books, memoirs and novels including the Booker Prize in 1987 for Moon Tiger.